Terms of use

These terms, and who provides this site

These terms apply to your use of CTINDEX.org and to the material published on it. By using the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

CTI is operated by b10, which publishes this website and is the contracting party for the purposes of these terms.

Operator

B10HUB LIMITED, trading as b10

Company number

NI718817

Registered address

Office 1145, 92 Castle Street, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT1 1HE

Contact

the Contact page

How CTI handles personal information is explained separately in the privacy notice.

What CTINDEX.org is, and is not

CTINDEX.org publishes the Commercial Transformation Index: what it measures, how it is structured, the rules its evidence must satisfy, and the commercial intelligence produced from it. It is a research and reference surface.

Published material describes commercial systems in general. It cannot establish anything about a specific organisation that has not been assessed, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own circumstances.

Nothing on this site is financial, legal, tax or investment advice, and nothing on it is an offer or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.

How you may use published material

CTI publishes to be read and used. Within these terms, and subject to the attribution requirement below, you may:

• read, download and print pages for your own or your organisation's internal use;
• quote a reasonable extract in a report, article, presentation, proposal or academic work;
• reproduce a published chart or table, unaltered, with its stated population and period;
• link to any page on this site, and share a link freely;
• cite CTI research in commercial and non-commercial work alike. CTI draws no distinction between the two for the purpose of citation.

Within these terms you may not, without written permission:

• reproduce a publication in full, or a part of it substantial enough to substitute for it;
• alter a CTI figure, chart or finding and continue to present it as CTI material, or separate a figure from the population and period that give it meaning;
• present illustrative material as a CTI finding. Illustrative material is labelled wherever it appears;
• present the Commercial Transformation Index, or a derivative of it, as your own framework, methodology or product;
• imply that CTI endorses, certifies, accredits or has assessed an organisation that it has not;
• use the site in a way that damages it, interferes with it or breaks the law.

Attribution and citation

Where you share, reproduce, publish, present, quote or otherwise make material use of content from this site, reference CTI as the source. This is the condition on which the material is made available, and it applies to commercial and non-commercial use alike.

Attribution has to be clear enough to be useful. A reference buried where a reader will not find it, or one that names a republisher rather than CTI, does not satisfy this.

This requirement applies to CTI material. It is not a claim over the underlying facts, and it does not restrict anything you are entitled to do under the exceptions described below.

Intellectual property

CTI, or its licensors, own the rights in the material published on this site. The claim is to the material CTI created, and it is deliberately specific.

What CTI owns

Original written analysis and commentary; the Commercial Transformation Index methodology as expressed, including its structure, its domain and evidence architecture and its published wording; charts, diagrams, visualisations and their design; tables, datasets and benchmark outputs, including database rights where they subsist; published reports and research; the CTI name, wordmark and symbol; and the design, layout and presentation of this site.

What CTI does not own

The underlying facts a finding reports. Ideas, concepts, methods and principles as such. Third-party material reproduced under licence or attribution, including external sources cited in CTI research, which belongs to the party named. Anything CTI has expressly published under a different licence, in which case that licence governs it.

What is preserved regardless

Nothing in these terms restricts fair dealing for criticism, review, quotation, reporting current events, research or private study, or any other exception or right that applies under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or other applicable law. Where a term here would conflict with such a right, that right prevails.

The CTI methodology is published so that it can be examined and checked. Publishing it is not a licence to reproduce it as a competing product or service.

Automated access, extraction and AI

CTINDEX.org is built to be found, read and cited by machines as well as by people. Structured content, stable URLs and a published methodology exist for that reason. These terms are written to keep that true, and to draw one line: between retrieving and citing CTI material, and appropriating it.

Permitted

Crawling and indexing by search engines, in accordance with this site's robots directives. Retrieval, summarising and citation by AI assistants, answer engines and research tools that attribute CTI as the source and, where the interface allows, link to the page. Archiving by recognised web archives. Accessibility, reading and translation tools used by a reader. Reasonable automated access at a rate that does not degrade the service for others.

Not permitted without written permission

Systematic or bulk extraction of content from this site. Extraction or re-utilisation of all or a substantial part of the contents of a CTI dataset or database. Republication of CTI material at scale, or in a form that substitutes for coming to the source. Redistribution or resale of CTI material as a product, dataset or feed. Ingesting CTI material into a corpus used to train, fine-tune or otherwise develop a commercial machine learning model.

The last of these is a reservation of rights, expressly including for the purposes of any text and data mining exception that permits reservation. It is not a prohibition on a machine reading a page in order to answer a question and cite the answer, which CTI welcomes.

If you want to do something this section does not permit, ask. CTI would rather license a use it understands than discover it afterwards, and research collaboration and data licensing are both routes CTI actively supports.

Assessments, results and reports

Each assessment route states what it examines, what it can establish and what it cannot. Those statements form part of the terms on which a result is provided, and they are not marketing qualifications.

• An observed result describes what was externally visible at the time it was gathered.
• A declared result rests partly on what a participant reports, and is labelled declared for that reason.
• A validated result rests on evidence reviewed by an assessor, and states what that evidence does not establish.
• No result converts into another. A validated position requires validated evidence, and a score produced by one route is not interchangeable with a score produced by another.

A result or report produced for an organisation is provided for that organisation's own use. Publishing it, circulating it outside the organisation or using it in marketing is a matter for the engagement it was produced under, and permission should be sought through that engagement rather than assumed from these terms.

A CTI assessment is a measurement, not a certification. It does not accredit an organisation and does not warrant any commercial outcome.

Separately contracted services

These terms govern this website and the material published on it. They do not contract for paid work.

Commissioned audits, programmes, cohorts, research collaborations and licensing arrangements are agreed in a separate written engagement, which sets the scope, the fees, the deliverables, the confidentiality position and the commercial terms. Where an engagement and these terms differ, the engagement governs that engagement.

These terms are not the contract for commissioned or paid CTI work, and nothing published on this website is an offer capable of acceptance or a quotation for such work.

Where CTI offers a paid product or service, it is supplied on its own applicable commercial or order terms, which are provided with that product or service, and those terms govern it. These website terms neither state nor replace them. The commercial terms for an audit, a programme or a licence are a different instrument from the terms on which a research website is read, and collapsing the two would serve neither.

Accuracy, corrections and reliance

CTI takes accuracy seriously because its output is evidence. Published material is checked before publication, every figure carries the population it describes, and every method note states what the evidence cannot support.

Research is still research. A finding describes the organisations it was drawn from and the period it covers, and it can be superseded. CTI does not warrant that published material is complete, current or free from error.

Where something published here is found to be wrong, it is corrected. A correction is recorded against the publication rather than applied silently, and a finding that can no longer be supported is withdrawn with the reason stated.

Decisions you take on the basis of published material are yours. Material published here cannot take account of your circumstances, and general research is not a diagnosis of a specific organisation.

Availability

This site is provided as it stands and as it is available. CTI does not guarantee that it will be available without interruption or free from error, and may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it.

Published material is versioned as the methodology is versioned. A URL for published research is intended to remain stable, which is what makes a citation worth making.

External links and third-party material

This site links to external sources, and CTI research cites them. A link is not an endorsement. CTI does not control an external site, is not responsible for its content or its handling of your information, and its own terms apply when you go there.

Where CTI analyses or cites a named external source, that analysis is CTI's and the underlying material remains the source's. Statistics, publications and datasets attributed to a third party are used under that party's terms, and reproducing them from this site does not give you a licence the source has not given.

Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If you deal with CTI as a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything here.

Subject to that, CTI is not liable for business losses arising from your use of this site or reliance on material published on it, including loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill, anticipated savings, data or opportunity, and is not liable for indirect or consequential loss.

Liability arising under a separate engagement is governed by that engagement, not by this section.

Changes to these terms

These terms are dated. CTI may update them, and the effective date changes when it does. Material use of the site after a change means the updated terms apply to that use, so it is worth checking the date if you rely on a specific provision.

A change to these terms does not alter the terms of an engagement already agreed.

Governing law and disputes

The United Kingdom has three legal systems: England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. They are separate jurisdictions with separate courts, and CTI's operator is registered in Northern Ireland.

These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or with your use of this site, are governed by the law of Northern Ireland, and the courts of Northern Ireland have jurisdiction over them.

If you are a consumer, that choice does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory rule of the law of the place where you live, and you may be able to bring proceedings in the courts there. Nothing in this section affects a right you have under law that cannot be given up by agreement.

Where CTI is engaged under a separate written agreement, the governing law and the courts with jurisdiction for that engagement are stated in it, and they govern that engagement.

Contact

Questions about these terms, about citing CTI research, about licensing CTI material, or about a use this page does not cover, go through the Contact page, which routes an enquiry to the people who can answer it.

Questions about your own personal information go to the privacy address published in the privacy notice.